The Semmerling LM-4 Pistol: Sleek, strange, secretive, sought
Sure, it looks like a smooth little semi-auto mouse gun but, as with many things in this crazy world, under it’s sleekness hides some strangeness. First, it’s not a pee-shooter, but rather a 5-shot .45 ACP hardballer. Second, its not semi-auto at all but rather more of a pump-action. It’s the Semmerling LM-4, and though it may look like a swan to some, at its heart it’s still one odd little duck.
Since the beginning of modern time, there have been rough handed individuals whose services are retained by certain quiet branches of the government to maintain a fragile system of covert operations. These individuals are sent to exotic places, meet interesting people, and occasionally have to fight for their lives to make it back home.
In the 1970s, a small shadowy company in the Boston area by the name of the Semmerling Corporation began producing a compact little gun for the special purpose of arming such individuals. The primary tenants of the pistol was that it be a small and durable as possible, with absolute reliability but crucially pack a decent punch—no mouse guns, as the gun was to allow a covert agent working deep cover, to have a concealed firearm to engage in violence if they could not otherwise extract themselves from the situation.
Read the rest in my column at GUNS.com
US and German troops vs SS Panzers…it really happened
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/05/12/world-war-ii-s-strangest-battle-when-
americans-and-germans-fought-together.html?utm_source=feedburner
On 5 May 1945—five days after Hitler’s suicide—three Sherman tanks from the 23rd Tank Battalion of the U.S. 12th Armored Division under the command of Capt. John C. ‘Jack’ Lee Jr., liberated an Austrian castle called Schloss Itter in the Tyrol, a special prison that housed various French VIPs, including the ex-prime ministers Paul Reynaud and Eduard Daladier and former commanders-in-chief Generals Maxime Weygand and Paul Gamelin, amongst several others. Yet when the units of the veteran 17th Waffen-SS Panzer Grenadier Division arrived to recapture the castle and execute the prisoners, Lee’s beleaguered and outnumbered men were joined by anti-Nazi German soldiers of the Wehrmacht, as well as some of the extremely feisty wives and
girlfriends of the (needless-to-say hitherto bickering) French VIPs, and together they fought off some of the best crack troops of the Third Reich. Steven Spielberg, how did you miss this story?
The battle for the fairytale, 13th century Castle Itter was the only time in WWII that American and German troops joined forces in combat, and it was also the only time in American history that U.S. troops defended a medieval castle against sustained attack by enemy forces…read the rest at the link above.
Schloss Itter
Warship Wednesday, May 22 The Mighty Miss
Here at LSOZI, we are going to take out every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1859-1946 time period and will profile a different ship each week.
- Christopher Eger
Warship Wednesday, May 22
Mississippi as a brand new battleship in WWI complete with lattice masts and disruptive anti-U boat camouflage
Here we see the New Mexico class battleship USS Mississippi (BB-41) in about 1918. The Mighty Miss had a career much longer than most other WWI-era battleships and gave good service for over forty years.
Laid down just a few months after the start of WWI in Europe, she was commissioned 18 December 1917 some eight months after the entry of the US into the Great War. Built as a oil-fired ship (most other warships of the era were coal burners), her WWI career was spent largely in US waters, a fleet in being along the US East Coast should the High Seas Fleet of Kaiser Wilhelm ever make a sortie to New York. In 1931 she was overhauled and modernized, spending almost all of the time period from 1919-1941 in the Pacific.
(Notice the much lower masts and more streamlined look. She was one of the most modern battleships of WWI, but sadly was pushing obsolescence by 1940)
She would have been at Pearl Harbor more than likely alongside her sisters New Mexico and Idaho, but all three ships were sent to the Atlantic in June 1941 to help enforce the neutrality patrol against Nazi U-Boats. Once the Japanese struck in the Pacific however, Mississippi and her sisters were sent racing back to the Pacific. For the first several months of the war she protected convoys up and down the West Coast as California braced for invasion. In 1943 she helped protect the landings in the Aleutian Islands. After conducting shore bombardments in Peleiu, Makin Island, Kwajalein, and others, she found herself in the last Battleship vs Battleship action– the Battle of Suriago Strait. There, Mississippi herself fired the final salvo in history by a battleship against other warships– contributing to the sinking of Japanese battleship Yamashiro.
(Again with the camouflage. During WWII her armament of anti-aircraft guns steadily increased)
More shore bombardments in the Philippines and Okinawa took place before she witnessed the surrender of Japan in Tokyo Bay, winning a total of eight battle stars. In 1946, while most of the rest of the pre-1938 US battleships were laid up and/or scrapped, Mississippi was reclassified from BB-41 to AG-128 (auxiliary, gunnery training/guided missile ship) and spent the next decade as a platform for development of surface to air and surface to surface missiles. For this her rear turrets were removed to give a platform of missile launchers. Without her, the RIM-2 Terrier and Petrel missiles would never have been adopted.
Mississippi firing Terrier missiles in 1955. This hybrid missile/gun arrangement was a wet-dream for battleship advocates for the next fifty years. When the Iowa class were eventually recommissioned in the early 1980s, they were given 16 harpoon anti-ship missiles and 32 Tomahawk cruise missiles in place of a few of the 5-inch twin mounts, but never a large SAM complement as envisioned earlier.
Stricken in 1956, at the time she was the last pre-WWII battleship in active service with the US Navy. Of the 12 WWII era US dreadnoughts, only three of the Iowa class were on active duty when Mississippi was decommissioned. The other 9 much newer North Carolina, SoDak, Alaska, and Iowa-class battleships and battle cruisers all being laid up in red lead row as members of the mothball fleet. Within a few years all of these except the Iowas would be pulled from mothballs and sent either to live the rest of their lives as museum ships, or broken up.
Mississippi herself was scrapped without ceremony at the end of 1956, just shy of her 40th birthday. Today knick knacks of the ship sail beneath the sea with the modern Virgina-class submarine USS Mississippi, after being carried for a while by a large nuclear-powered guided missile cruiser of the same name while her bell and silver set are on display in her home state.
Specs
Displacement: 32,000 long tons (32,500 t)
Length: 624 ft (190 m)
Beam: 97.4 ft (29.7 m)
Draft: 30 ft (9.1 m)
Speed: 21 kn (24 mph; 39 km/h)
Complement: 55 officers, 1,026 enlisted
Armament: (1917)
12 × 14 in (360 mm) guns,
14 × 5 in (130 mm)/51 cal guns
4 × 3 in (76 mm) guns, and
2 × 21 in (530 mm) torpedo tubes
Armor:
Belt: 8–13.5 in (203–343 mm)
Barbettes: 13 in (330 mm)
Turret face: 18 in (457 mm)
Turret sides: 9–10 in (229–254 mm)
Turret top: 5 in (127 mm)
Turret rear 9 in (229 mm)
Conning tower: 11.5 in (292 mm)
Decks: 3.5 in (89 mm)
If you liked this column, please consider joining the International Naval Research Organization (INRO)
They are possibly one of the best sources of naval lore http://www.warship.org/naval.htm
The International Naval Research Organization is a non-profit corporation dedicated to the encouragement of the study of naval vessels and their histories, principally in the era of iron and steel warships (about 1860 to date). Its purpose is to provide information and a means of contact for those interested in warships.
Nearing their 50th Anniversary, Warship International, the written tome of the INRO has published hundreds of articles, most of which are unique in their sweep and subject.
I’m a member, so should you be!
Coast Guard Bringing Lost WWII Airmen Back Home
The service today began the public process of searching for a company who can bring three airmen killed in the line of duty – on November 29, 1942 – back home to U.S. soil.
The difficulty is that the three men, two from the Coast Guard and one from the Army, are encased in ice, 40 ft. below the surface near Koge Bay, Greenland, in their amphibious J2F-4.
The Grumman J2 Duck was one of the great unsung little aircraft of WWII. One of these planes has just been found 40 feet under the ice in Greenland with its two USCG crewmen and a rescued US Army aviator entombed.
“The United States Coast Guard has located a downed J2F-4 Grumman Duck aircraft in the arctic of Greenland that was lost during World War 2,” reads the sources sought notice in today’s Federal Business Opportunities website. “The aircraft is in a remote region of the arctic and buried under 40 feet of ice.” Onboard, presumably, are Coast Guard Lt. John Pritchard, Petty Officer 1st Class Benjamin Bottoms and U.S. Army Air Force Cpl. Loren Howarth.
Keep reading at Aviation Week
Never let it be said that the U.S. Coast Guard doesn’t take care of its own in addition to others.
The L85 British Bullpup: The last Enfield
It’s hard to imagine today but for over 150-years the UK firearms arsenal at Enfield armed the world. Their 3-band rifles were the go-to gun of the US Civil War and their Short Magazine Lee Enfield bolt guns kept London from having the street signs redone in German through two world wars. Then in 1985, everything went pear-shaped.
In 1954, RSAF Enfield and BSA began production of the 7.62x51mm NATO caliber L1A1 Self-Loading Rifle for the British military to replace their long-serving stocks of Short Magazine Lee Enfield Rifles, a design that had lasted the Brits for nearly 70 years. The L1A1 was a version of the Belgian FN FAL rifle, set up in semi-auto and using SAE or ‘inch-pattern’ templates rather than metric. It proved a hard serving rifle and saw use in the Suez, Malaysia, Aden, Northern Ireland and the Falklands as well as being adopted by close allies Canada, Australia, and New Zealand among others. However by the late 1970s, the L1A1 was a bit long in the tooth, and well, a bit long overall (45-inchs) as well. With most of NATO at the time already using smaller, 5.56mm-chambered rifles such as the M16, FAMAS, and HK33, the UK decided to get on the smaller caliber/smaller weapon bandwagon.
Read the rest in my column at GUNS.com
Warship Wednesday, May 15 The First Night Carrier
Here at LSOZI, we are going to take out every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1859-1946 time period and will profile a different ship each week.
- Christopher Eger
Warship Wednesday, May 15
Here we see the light carrier USS Independence (CV/CVL-22). Began as the light cruiser USS Amsterdam (CL-59) in 1940, she was converted while still at New York Shipbuilding Corp., Camden, N.J to help fill the urgent and pressing need for fast carriers after Pearl Harbor. A 30/30 ship, she could make 30+ knots and carry 30+ aircraft while having legs long enough to cross the Pacific and operate on her own for a few weeks before she needed to find an oiler. While she was much smaller than a regular fleet carrier such as the Enterprise that could carry 80-90 aircraft, she could still put a few squadrons in the air.
In effect, she was good-enough.
Above you see a scale model of the USS Duluth (CL-87) compared to the USS Belleau Wood (CVL-24) both are directly related to the Indy. The Duluth is a Cleavland-class cruiser and is what the Indy was originally ordered to be. The Belleau Wood underwent to same conversion that Indy did. Notice the similarity in the hull. Both ships only differed above the 01 deck.
When Independence was commissioned on January 14th 1943, the only other carriers in the fleet of the original 8 that started WWII were the Enterprise and Saratoga who were fighting for their lives off the Solomons, and the small USS Ranger which was up to her ass in U-Boats in the Atlantic. The new USS Essex had commissioned just a couple of weeks earlier and was in shakedown. The old carrier Langley, converted to a seaplane tender, had been lost early in the war, the huge Lexington was sent to the bottom at the Battle of the Coral Sea, Yorktown lost at Midway, Wasp and Hornet (stricken literally the day before Independence was commissioned from the Naval List) lost in the Solomons.
In short, the Indy came just in time and she was put to hard work fast. Before the year was out she was conducting raids off Marcus Island, Rabaul, and the Gilberts– tying down Japanese forces needed elsewhere. It was in these raids that the Indy picked up a torpedo (one of a half-dozen fired at her) in her starboard quarter. As this was repaired, she received a new air-group, an additional catapult, and a new mission– that of a night carrier.
The first full-time night Air Group was Air Group 41, established through the drive and persistence of Lt. Commander Turner F Caldwell. He commissioned VF(N)-79 in January 1944, training at NAAF Charlestown, Rhode Island. While at Charlestown Caldwell sold his idea of an ‘pure’ night air group to anyone who would listen. With the availability of the CVL Independence Caldwell got his wish. VF(N)-75 was dissolved and reformed as VF(N)-41, with an enlarged TBM contingent designated as VT(N)-41. Total size of the Air Group was 14 F6F-5N’s, 5 F6F-5′s and 12 TBM Avengers. Independence sailed for Eniwetok at the end of July 1944 to join Task Force 38. Air Group 41 finished it’s tour in January 1945. In that time it had claimed 46 kills, but lost ten of it’s 35 night fighter pilots in action, A further three were lost to operational causes – a tribute to the high training standards and skill of the group. The CVL Independence was the only light carrier to be completely equipped with a Night Air Group. Later in 1945 several large carriers and even a much smaller Jeep Carrier (CVE-108 Kula Gulf) went to Night Groups including Enterprise, Saratoga and Bon Homme Richard– but the Indy was the first.
By the end of the war she held 8 battlestars.
The Japanese couldn’t sink her, so the Navy decided to use her for testing. Since the USN had dozens of brand new fleet carriers of the Essex types, it didn’t need the old Indy anymore. Therefore, she was only 1/2 mile from ground zero on 1 July 1946 when the A-bomb went off in the Bikini Atoll tests. When she didn’t sink, they used her again for another A-bomb test three weeks later. Still afloat, she was only scuttled in 1951 off the coast of San Fransisco. Five of her remaining sisters pressed on and were used during the Cold War as transports, anti-submarine carriers, and as the first modern carriers that the French and Spanish navies had– one, the former USS Cabot, even tested the first Harriers at sea.
Indy is just to the right of the giant column of water that is much wider than she is long….
In the end you can say that the Indy had a hard life in her eight years above water to say the least.
Today, even after being under 3100-feet of seawater for 60 years, she is still on the job. You see ,she took down 70,000 sealed barrels of 1940s radioactive materiel with her which she is guarding in the forever night of the deep ocean and is forbidden to dive on using any means.
In a way, she is still a night carrier, with a very dangerous cargo.
Specs:
Displacement: 11,000 tons standard; 15,100 tons full load
Dimensions (wl): 600′ x 71′ 6″ x 26′ (max) / 182.9 x 21.8 x 7.9 (max) meters
Dimensions (max.): 622′ 6″ x 109′ 2″ / 189.7 x 33.3 meters
Armor: no side belt (2″ belt over fwd magazine); 2″ protective deck(s); 0.38″ bridge; 5″/3.75″ bhds; 5″ bhds, 2.25″ above, 0.75″ below steering gear
Power plant: 4 boilers (565 psi, 850°F); 4 geared turbines; 4 shafts; 100,000 shp (design)
Speed: 31.6 knots
Endurance (design): 12,500 nautical miles @ 15 knots
Armament: 2 single 5″/38 gun mounts (soon removed); 2 quad 40-mm/56-cal gun mounts (in place of 5″ mounts); 8 (soon 9) twin 40-mm/56-cal gun mounts; 16 single 20-mm/70-cal guns mounts
Aircraft: 30+
Aviation facilities: 2 centerline elevators; 1 hydraulic catapult
Crew: approx. 1,560
If you liked this column, please consider joining the International Naval Research Organization (INRO)
They are possibly one of the best sources of naval lore http://www.warship.org/naval.htm
The International Naval Research Organization is a non-profit corporation dedicated to the encouragement of the study of naval vessels and their histories, principally in the era of iron and steel warships (about 1860 to date). Its purpose is to provide information and a means of contact for those interested in warships.
Nearing their 50th Anniversary, Warship International, the written tome of the INRO has published hundreds of articles, most of which are unique in their sweep and subject.
I’m a member, so should you be!
The Suppressed ‘Shaft’ and ‘Threadcutter’ Rifles: One bad mother, shut your mouth
Thought historically tight-lipped about all things military, one thing the Russians have never kept secret is existence of their robust special operations, or spetsnaz, community, which they have fostered for many generations. These operators fielded the finest hardware found East of Berlin and, going back to the 1980s, the Soviets had an itch for a long-range suppressed rifle and scratched it with a Shaft and a Thread Cutter, so to speak.
Formed in the 1950s from lessons learned fighting the Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany, the spetsnaz (a Russian acronym for special purpose) units were bad hombres and by the later Soviet era, spetsnaz troops (roughly the commie version of the special forces/ranger type units) were a huge part of the Motherland’s military machine. At the height of the Cold War, the Soviets had no less than 14 army and 2 naval brigades of these troops compared to the sole US Army Ranger regiment and five Special Forces groups.
These groups in general, by the nature of their role on the battlefield, have long sought out suppressed weapons and on both sides of the curtain, most got by with regular issue guns with fitted external suppressors. By the early 1980s, they wanted something better and that is where the VSS and AS came in.
Read the Rest in my column at GUNS.com
The Austrian Steyr-Hahn M1912 Pistol: ‘Like if Picasso drew a 1911…
Long before Gaston Glock stopped building curtain rods and moved on to polymer pistols, the Austrian firm of Steyr was producing innovative handgun designs. One of their most curious and downright oddball offerings was their Model 1912.
The Austria of today is a small country about the size of Maine. The Austria of 1912 however was much different. With a population of more than 50-million people, it was the center of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and included almost half of central Europe including what we know today as Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Croatia, Slovakia, and of course, Austria. This polyglot country had a large army of more than a million men when mobilized. Poorly led but massive in size and brilliantly equipped, the Austrian army used some of the best small arms, machine guns, and field artillery of the time. When you realize that the companies that are now Steyr-Mannlicher, FEG, and CZ were behind these weapons, it’s easy to see gun making is in their blood.
In 1911, the regular Army was equipped with the striker-fired 8mm M1907 Roth-Steyr. To arm the Austrian Landwehr, a form of National Guard, the government of the Kaiser (they had one too), needed a new and modern pistol. While the regulars had a new handgun, the reservists of the Landwher still had to make due with old Gasser revolvers. With war in the neighboring Balkans and a looming crisis with Tsarist Russia, the time for an upgrade was at hand.
Read the rest in my column at GUNS.com
Sunken USCGC Mohawk To Get Underwater Photo Gallery
Past Warship Wednesday subject Mohawk will be getting a diver-viewable photo gallery installed.
“In May, Austrian photographer Andreas Franke plans to hang a series of photographs on Mohawk Veterans Memorial Reef, thus creating a temporary art exhibit only accessible to divers. Helping on the project will be the Lee County Division of Marine Sciences and Joe Weatherby, founder of Reefmakers LLC, a Key West-based company that specializes in sinking ships as artificial reefs.
On July 2, 2012, county scientists and Reefmakers scuttled the 165-foot World War II Coast Guard cutter Mohawk 30 miles off Redfish Pass.”
The News Press also has a great interactive graphic of the Mohawk herself.
Richardson’s Philippine Guerrilla Gun: A gun to get a gun
Americans have long been a fan of shotguns, pumps, semi-autos, over and unders, you name it, we love em. One red-blooded American even ran into an interesting one while doing a little Wolverines-style combat in the Philippines and thought it would catch on back home once the smoke cleared. His name was Richardson, and his idea is best known as the Philippine Guerrilla Gun.
Read the rest in my column at Guns.com
Goodreads
